


Fleeting

by herbalistic



Category: Utopia (TV 2013)
Genre: F/M, bad things happen to good people ok please don't judge me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-28
Updated: 2014-07-28
Packaged: 2018-02-10 20:14:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2038590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/herbalistic/pseuds/herbalistic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“If we’re remembered that means this has all gone rather horribly wrong.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fleeting

 

 

> _To want is to have a weakness._
> 
> **Margeret Atwood** The Handmaid's Tale

 

 

“Beer?”

She shrugs, “It’ll do. No gin?” There’s an edge to the question, the inflection of Milner’s shoulders and voice and smirk.

“None,” he says, “You’re so terribly enlightened.” He enunciates that sentence the way she would, and in anyone else’s mouth it would be mocking.

“It was all uphill,” she deadpans as she necks the lager and stands to tune the television into the news. “I came from nothing.”

“No you didn’t.”

“No,” and for a moment he could imagine her wistful, her kink of casual worldliness come to the fore. “I didn’t.” She finishes, before the thought can linger.

“So what did you come from?” It’s a close enough approximation to a personal question. The television set flickers in his periphery: murders, muggings and betrayals.

Again she shrugs, “A world away, it feels like.” She catches his eye for a second and he thinks he sees her scared, but she sets her bottle down deliberately and turns to look at him square.

He wants her, but he also wants badly to love her.

“We’re different, you and me,” she says eventually, “From each other and everybody else. But I’m still not sure how.”

 

 

 

There’s an irony to Milner; the murderer on a mission to save mankind. Philip had asked her once, how she’d like to be remembered.

“Oh no,” she had said and laughed hollowly, “If we’re remembered that means this has all gone rather horribly wrong.”

 

 

 

Tom dies in a bathtub filled with lukewarm water and vomit.

Philip fancies her sad, the downturn of her mouth. “You loved him,” he ventures, eventually. It’s phrased as a statement but he means it as a question. In another world Philip might have been a romantic.

“Yes,” she agrees, “but he never really loved me. Not the way you do. Brain love, he called it.” A smile breaks and he pulls his hand back from her waist. His head dips.

“He was so broken.” She says and her jaw sets.

A hanging silence: “Fag?”

“I’ve had enough habits for a lifetime, thank you.” Terse. For contrast, she gestures limply and it’s perhaps her only hint of grief.

“Want to indulge his?” This is all he can offer and she eyes him warily in return.

“It would be rather fitting, wouldn’t it?”

 

 

 

They’ve never flirted, and he doubts they ever will, yet every time she smiles at him he falls a little further.

She considers her glass, lets the light shatter prisms across the liquid within, “It really is great stuff, isn’t it?”

The stuff she is speaking of killed her husband and that fact is not lost on Philip. “Yes,” he smiles, “Funny, the things it achieves.”

Her eyes spark, “Remember the night we met?”

“A blackout, some old farts on about malaria.” It’s deliberately hazy.

“You told me to fuck off and I told you to make me. Then I threatened to jump off a balcony.”

The lights in her sitting room flicker and for a second she looks to Philip just like she did then: pretty and skinny and _ginger_. He laughs at himself, lets her interpret it how she likes. “Yes,” he says with another bark of laughter, “I remember that part.”

“And then we talked all night, until—“ a swallow, “—until Tom needed to go. Which of us came up with the name? _Janus_.” She raises her glass to toast his two faces.

“You,” he says like a reflex. His wrist twitches. “I wanted something—“

“—more discreet.” She finishes, her laugh tinkling into silence. The glass in her hand clatters when she sets it down. “Never leave me,” she says, sudden, “not the way he did.”

Her gaze is too unsteady to hold. “Never make me.”

 

 

 

There are promises she was never destined to keep.

“Never.”

 

 

 

“Penny for them?” The redhead’s wearing red and part of Philip aches a little. Her husband’s barely cold six foot under, his wife’s at home in her third trimester and a penny for _his_ thoughts? Her tits in that fucking dress.

Instead he clicks his neck. “You were saying the other day, about the night we met?”

“I remember.”

“You told me you’d been in a genocide?”

Her chest hiccups but he’s watching her eyes, fixed on a point over his shoulder and suddenly glassy. Steadily she meets his gaze and turns up the corners of her lips, “I haven’t been a murderous bitch my whole life, Philip.” The levity’s forced; he can see her hands white around the edge of the bench.

Philip’s reply comes before he thinks about it. “What changed?”

If she’s taken aback she hides it. She rocks forward, considers her answer. Philip can see the calculations she’s making and it reminds him, fleetingly, of something she said about Tom forever ago: _I want him to continue loving me._

She doesn’t speak, so he answers himself. “We could end human pain with an injection.”

Her brow tightens, “That’s the plan.”

“We’re neutering the planet.” Like an echo.

Tighter. “When you can’t feed the pups you can neuter the bitch or hold their heads underwater.” She moves closer and her voice warms. “Where’s all this coming from, Philip?”

At this his hand lands heavy on her thigh and her mouth forms a gentle _O_. “ _Brain_ love,” she chides ever so quietly. He’s got the knack of her: her pupils are shot wide when his hand slides under her skirt.

 

 

 

He drew her once. Her hair shot the paper red.

It survived a week before he burnt it, later finding himself drawing her eyes on shopping lists and scraps – big and open and screaming with the fear he’d last seen balanced on a table top in 1974.

 

 

 

There’s a complication that ends with Brosca in a box.

“You did this.”

“No.” He’d expected her mouth to fall open, but instead it tightens and takes on a downward curl. “No,” she repeats, “I fucking _liked_ her, Philip!”

“And you fucking loved Tom, didn’t you?” He’s angry and breathless and _fuck_ she’s gorgeous. “Please just tell me the truth.”

Her chin in sharp under his palm when he pulls her face to his. She struggles for a second on the tips of her toes, then kisses him fierce.

“There,” she’s gasping, “Enough?”

He shrugs, then lunges back for more.

She’s all pelvis and skin under her dress. The fabric rucks easily enough, pulled up and down until it’s bunched around her waist with his hands alternating above and below its boundary. She’s perched on the edge of the table with him groping at her thighs like a fumbling teenager and her head tipped back. The way her legs spread, he feels a little like he’s trying to tear her limb from limb.

The way she bucks, that doesn’t seem too wide of the mark.

“Look at us,” her mouth is bitten and her bra’s halfway slipped to show nipple, “at it like fucking rabbits,” she says and it’s the most selfish thing he ever hears her say.

He’s too preoccupied by the pulling rotation of her wrist followed by a tight warmth to laugh. He lets himself meet her heavy gaze, “Jesus.”

“You’ve built me up too much Philip,” her syllables match the staccato rhythm of his hips against hers, “This was all,” a gasp, “your idea. It always was, all along.”

The hand in her hair pulls, and she hisses into his neck. He can’t bit down the keening noise that rises. “You know,” she says, breathless now, “I do think you’ve gone a little bit mad.”

 

 

 

“You’re slipping from me, Philip.” She says, and that’s when he knows this time is the last.

He orders Chinese and she cracks two beers. There’s an unfamiliar domesticity in play, and it makes him draw harder on the cigarette. “I was halfway to in love with you,” he’ll stutter and then catch her frown between his lips. She always hated how he tasted after tobacco and he’s grown happy to repulse.

“Post coital puff,” she says, pulling away; “So fucking pedestrian.” And then a flicker, “Was?”

It’s there again for that moment: that fear.

 

**End.**

 

 


End file.
